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London – A new PETA US investigation of Hudson Valley Foie Gras, which supplies Manhattan restaurant Gordon Ramsay at The London, has revealed shocking cruelty to ducks at the factory farm, which calls itself the "premier producers of foie gras" in the US. PETA US has sent flamboyant celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay – who has rejected some of the pork industry's worst factory-farming practices on his show The F Word – a request to stop selling foie gras. PETA US included video footage revealing how Hudson Valley Foie Gras workers shove steel tubes down ducks' throats and dump huge amounts of grain into their bodies three times a day, every day, for weeks in order to sicken and enlarge the birds' livers. At slaughter, ducks are hung upside down, have their throats slit and are left to bleed to death.

Experts have found that force-feeding causes oesophageal tears and splits, liver rupture and failure, heat stress and aspiration pneumonia – and by the company's own calculation, some 15,000 ducks on the farm die every year before they make it to slaughter.

"Every exposé of foie gras farms has revealed how grotesquely cruel it is to jam pipes down birds' throats and force-feed them until they sicken and die", says PETA UK Associate Director Mimi Bekhechi. "We hope Gordon Ramsay and other chefs will swear off this particular 'F-word' – foie gras – for good."

This was not PETA US' first visit to a New York foie gras factory farm. In 1991, at a farm that was later acquired by Hudson Valley Foie Gras, PETA US investigators revealed cruel force-feeding and countless sick and injured ducks, including one whose maggot-covered neck wound was so severe that water spilled out of it when he drank.

PETA US' letter to Gordon Ramsay is available here, and broadcast-quality video footage from PETA US' investigation is available upon request. For more information about the cruelty behind foie gras, please visit PETA.org.uk.

International Sites:

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) Foundation—a charitable company limited by guarantee, with its registered office at 125 London Wall, London, EC2Y 5AS. Registered in England and Wales as charity number 1056453, company number 3135903.